We develop an unconditionally energy stable immersed boundary method, and apply it to simulate 2D vesicle dynamics. We adopt a semi-implicit boundary forcing approach, where the stretching factor used in the forcing term can be computed from the derived evolutional equation. By using the projection method to solve the fluid equations, the pressure is decoupled and we have a symmetric positive definite system that can be solved efficiently. The method can be shown to be unconditionally stable, in the sense that the total energy is decreasing. A resulting modification benefits from this improved numerical stability, as the time step size can be significantly increased (the severe time step restriction in an explicit boundary forcing scheme is avoided). As an application, we use our scheme to simulate vesicle dynamics in Navier-Stokes flow.

This paper studies the numerical simulations for the Cahn-Hilliard equation which describes a phase separation phenomenon. The numerical simulation of the Cahn-Hilliard model needs very long time to reach the steady state, and therefore large time-stepping methods become useful. The main objective of this work is to construct the unconditionally energy stable finite difference scheme so that the large time steps can be used in the numerical simulations. The equation is discretized by the central difference scheme in space and fully implicit second-order scheme in time. The proposed scheme is proved to be unconditionally energy stable and mass-conservative. An error estimate for the numerical solution is also obtained with second order in both space and time. By using this energy stable scheme, an adaptive time-stepping strategy is proposed, which selects time steps adaptively based on the variation of the free energy against time. The numerical experiments are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the adaptive time-stepping approach.